Work Ethic Surviving Severe Tests Down East

August 21, 1989|By Martin Merzer, Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

SOUTH ADDISON, ME. — After a lifetime of work, John Purington considers himself retired. So he takes out his lobster boat only five days a week for only 14 hours a day, and he and his wife share only three jobs.

``Yea-ah,`` Purington, 65, said with the distinctive flat accent of the Maine Down Easter. ``I`m just playing around now. It`s time to take it easy.`` This is about as close to retirement as most people get in Washington County, the easternmost county in the U.S. and a secluded corner of New England graced with great natural beauty but long afflicted with economic hardship.

Here is found a panorama not of abject poverty but of determined self-sufficiency that yields modest returns. In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, wage-earners constantly juggle a variety of jobs to make ends meet.

The majority of people here work as hard as they can, and by most standards, they have little to show for it. They are the working poor.

``People have to take advantage of whatever is here, which is really not a lot,`` said Tom Rush, who runs a blueberry processing operation. ``A year-round job is still coveted in this area.``

Rush is speaking about people like Helen Stanhope, 31. She helps her aging parents run a small grocery store. She cleans other peoples` homes. She maintains a local graveyard.

And every August, she works 10 hours a day in the blueberry fields, stooped over, using a hand-held rake to harvest fruit that brings about $6 an hour.

``I call it my annual torture test,`` she said.

Closer to Nova Scotia than to Boston, this area of Maine is too remote to serve as a manufacturing center or to benefit much from New England`s upswing in tourism.

The county`s population of about 33,800 is too small to require a large contingent of government employees or a healthy corps of service workers. So residents depend largely on natural resources such as seafood, timber and blueberries.

``Most of the people who do go to college here end up raking blueberries,`` said Stanhope.

Even in the best of times, though, no single natural resource can sustain a typical family here. And these are not the best of times: The sardines are nearly gone, the clam beds are running out and lobster prices are the lowest anyone has seen in years.

So, many people meander from job to job or work at two or three jobs in the spring and summer, hoarding money for the tough winter months.

They sign on with lobster boats or wholesalers between April and December. They weave Christmas wreaths from Maine balsam in the summer and fall. They stoop in the fields picking blueberries in August and in the muddy tidal banks searching for clams year-round.

The people here are proud, and they take the work ethic very seriously. But despite their best efforts, the numbers tell a sad tale.

Unemployment hovers at about 11 percent in Washington County, more than triple the statewide rate. Half of all households earn less than $15,000 a year. About 17 percent of county residents receive welfare payments, twice the statewide percentage.

The county`s population is declining as young adults move to southern Maine, Boston and Connecticut in search of prosperity.

Despite the problems, many residents like the area the way it is and fear economic development, even an upswing in tourism. Isolated for so long from the rest of the country, Down Easters-residents of extreme northeast Maine-are taciturn, suspicious of outsiders and set in their ways.

Yet, press them hard enough, and they will concede that it is very hard to earn a living here.

Cottage industry, if that is the word for it, is everywhere. Nearly every front yard anchors a sign offering to sell passersby fishing bait, clams, crab meat, lobsters, T-shirts. State labor officials say the locals often do not report this income to tax authorities.

Many of the yard signs go further: It seems that every other home is for sale. Some people want to leave; others are testing the market, hoping to lure some of the outside developers exploring the area.

Purington, a crusty New England fisherman who could have been sent by a movie studio`s central casting office, lived a typical professional life here. He worked for 27 years as a security guard and fireman for the federal government and supplemented that by trapping lobsters on his days off.

He also has fished for sardines, captained a private yacht, freelanced as a carpenter and-when times were really bad-dug clams.

Now, in retirement, he still takes out his lobster boat, has an interest in a boat-engine shop and helps his wife process and package crab meat in their kitchen.

Efforts to earn more than the minimum wage propel many residents and some migrant workers into the ``blueberry barrens``-about 200,000 remote and spectacularly undeveloped acres ill-suited to growing anything but ankle-high blueberry bushes.

Here, throughout August and into September, several thousand people stoop all day long, raking blueberries.

Cheryl Fernald was born and reared in the area and has been working the fields for almost 30 summers.

Now, at 40, she is trying to earn enough to pay for her last semester of college. She wants to be a teacher.

Nearby, her 15-year-old son, Scott, is earning extra money for school clothes.

Asked if she minds this kind of work at her stage of life, Fernald responds with what could be the creed of the Down Easter.

``My father was a lobster fisherman. I`m used to hard, physical work. I think the body was meant to be busy.

``We`re survivalists, I guess you might say. We know nothing is easy, and we`re willing to do whatever we have to do. I`m at an age where I know you have to work hard to get ahead.``